Trying to avoid the 20-year rule, but a recent article stated that '47.6 per cent of the population in the UK identify as Christian. It indicates Britain now has the fewest number of Christians in nearly 1,500 years. The Dark Ages in most of Europe, after the fall of Rome, lasted several centuries.'
Is this true? Was Britain majority non-Christian for that time? And for how long? How can we be sure?
"a recent article stated that '47.6 per cent of the population in the UK identify as Christian. It indicates Britain now has the fewest number of Christians in nearly 1,500 years. The Dark Ages in most of Europe, after the fall of Rome, lasted several centuries.'"
I just wanted to point out an interesting (and misleading) sleight-of-hand in the article.
Even if Christians are at their lowest percent of the overall British population in 1500 years, that's very different from there being the fewest number of Christians in Britain. The UK has over 67 million people living there, and 47.6% of the population is just under 32 million. The entire population of the United Kingdom didn't reach this level until the 1880s (and the British population was overwhelmingly Christian at the time), so it's more accurate to say that Britain has its fewest number of Christians in 140 years, not 1,500. For the record, there aren't good figures for the population of the British Isles in the Early Middle Ages, but Roman Britain maybe had 3 million people, and Norman England maybe had 1.5 million people, and the Early Middle Ages would have been much lower than either of those.
Another small aside is that it's honestly hard to compare Christians of the Early Middle Ages (in Britain or elsewhere) to modern ones, as beliefs and practices would have been very different between then and now. Medieval Christianity was ensconced in a complex, hierarchical system of magic and the supernatural that is not only very foreign to many moderns, but whose beliefs and practices would verge on being "un-Christian" to many Christians today.